In a remote Dead Sea area, not far from the Qumran caves where the oldest known Biblical scrolls were recently discovered, stands the mountain of Masada, itself an ancient and great memorial of the Jewish people, which has lately become a goal of pilgrimages motivated by archaeological interest and national ardor. Here Mark Sufrin and Jane Powell describe a journey to the mountain by a group of students.
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The young Israeli explores his country with the fervor of a lover. Throughout the year groups of youngsters in trucks, buses, or on foot, travel to Samson’s Ashkalon, Solomon’s Meggido, Mount Gilboa, Capernaum. One place, deep in the Negev, is only dimly known, but it is the Hastings and the Alamo, rolled up in one, of a nation that must go back almost two thousand years, beyond its recent war of independence, for past military glories. It is the ancient Herodian fortress of Masada, scene of one of the great mass suicides of history.
We started for Masada from Jerusalem on an unseasonably cold, wet morning in April. Six of us rode in a Land Rover, the more commodious British version of our jeep, as advance party for two trucks carrying thirty-four archaeology students of the Hebrew University. We met the trucks on the outskirts of the city and started the dizzy descent down the Judean hills. The distant Mesopotamian light defined the eroded hills in soft, gray shapes, but the valley below remained hidden in the mist. The vehicles plunged down and around until we hit the coastal plain.
After a few miles on the main road to Tel Aviv, we turned and sped south toward Faluja, Beersheba, and the desert. The morning sun struck at us from over the bare Jordan hills. As we came into Beersheba, Bedouins, the men in their fringed kafir headdress and the women in the black purdah that covered their faces, were already gathered on the dusty streets, driving sheep and goats. This was Thursday, the day before the Moslem holy day, and they had come to market as they had been coming for centuries. This desert city had become a boom-town under the new state. We stopped to eat our first ration of cheese, bread, and green peppers, and to briefly inspect the new movie theater and housing developments. Nothing of this newness, however, could dispel the awe of the name: Beersheba, where Abraham lived, the gateway to the Negev, the Biblical Wilderness.
Beyond the city there was only a desolation of eroded hills and gullies through which we rode for hours until we reached a military check-point at Kurnub—a lone tent from which a young, mustached soldier emerged to check our firearms and chat a few minutes with his old friend Menashke, our guide. We commiserated with him on the isolation of his post, and rode off in a chorus of shaloms. Soon we reached the great rift valley, part of which is filled by the Dead Sea. This gash across the face of the Middle East extends from Africa to Lebanon and is one of the most spectacular sights in the world.
We left the trucks and climbed to Ras al Zuerah, a lookout point commanding the desert we had traveled through and a magnificent view eastward to Jordan. With binoculars we examined the eroded eastern side of the canyon and the palm tree oasis jutting out into the poisonous Dead Sea. We were to descend and make directly for the spring at Urn Bari near its shore, a seven hours’ walk. The trucks and the Land Rover were to take a roundabout route to Sodom, to pick us up there and carry us some miles farther to the foot of Masada.
To our surprise we arrived at Um Bari before the vehicles. The thought of the recent Scorpion Pass massacre unsettled us, and there was talk of sending back a party to look for the three drivers. Just then we heard the grinding gears of the trucks as they mounted the small rise where we stood. They had been delayed by a more implacable enemy than desert marauders: a road had been washed into the Dead Sea by the winter rains. We drove the short distance to Masada, and on the way it was decided that the first part of the ascent would be made in the early morning hours. We made camp on the sandy beach at the foot of the truncated mountain, sang and danced and drank the heady Turkish coffee that Menashke brewed.
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The wind was rising and we took to the sheltering dunes for an hour’s sleep. The lightning that had flashed intermittently all the late afternoon as we tramped, outlining the nearby hills in steel-colored coruscations, came more blinding and faster. Sleep was impossible, and as we lay half-drowsing, a sudden great gust of wind tore our blankets away and a terrifying explosion ripped the valley. Our first thought was: “Arabs!” We raced to the trucks for our weapons. In a few seconds a spatter of rain made us realize that it was only thunder. Nevertheless we gripped our rifles hard. One of the boys laughed, shouted something in Hebrew, pointed his Skoda pistol into the night air, and shot off a few rounds. We all joined in, and the staccato calmed us.
In only minutes, a strange figure approached. He was wearing a great khaki-colored overcoat, with Zouave-like pants flowing out from under his coat into short boots, and on his head an enormous knitted hood that hung down almost to his waist. He was a Druze soldier on patrol, member of a strange mountain people, neither Jew nor Moslem, that sided with Israel in the war with the Arabs. When he satisfied himself that we were just a group of nervous students bound for Masada, he smiled and ran back into the desert night. We huddled for a short while in the covered trucks, and then as the rain slackened, Menashke shouted that if we were to start at all, now was the time. Dawn was a few hours off, and we had a long climb ahead of us before the sun reached its height. We checked our equipment, swallowed a weak mixture of tea and brandy, and moved out in single file.
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When you first see the bulk of Masada close up you can only doubt the possibility of climbing it. The Roman legionnaire climbing this same path, though fortified by the sounds of marching comrades and clanging armor and great battering machines, must have felt the same apprehension. Masada is a monstrous cone, but with its sides rising almost perpendicularly for hundreds of feet. History, however, records that both Jewish and Roman troops scaled Masada. The fortress itself was on a broad plateau at the summit. A Roman garrison was slaughtered here by the Sicarii (“Dagger Men”), as the Zealot extremists were called by the Romans. Six years later the Romans themselves laid siege to a band of Sicarii entrenched on the summit. The struggle that ensued was to be the last act of military resistance carried out by the Jewish people as a sovereign nation for almost two thousand years.
Avoiding the steeply winding eastern approach, which Flavius Joseph called the “Serpent,” we circled past the ruins of the Roman camp at the base of the mountain and the wall built there to prevent the besieged from escaping, and started up the western slope, picking our way up a path well worn over the last twenty years by young adventurers hungry for the thrill of gaining the fortress and studying the archaeological remains clustered near its top.
Most of us were new to mountain climbing. Our ascent was slow and grinding, but it was steady, and at daybreak we reached a broad rock some four hundred fifty feet from the top. This was the famous White Promontory where Silva, the Roman general, directed his men to build great banks of earth and stone that rose to within nearly seventy-five feet of the summit. From these banks, in turn, the Romans raised ninety-foot towers on which they mounted machines for hurling fire darts and stones. These had been devised by Vespasian, and had continued to be used by his son Titus, in their war with the Jews.
We posted guards, kindled a small fire, and took a short rest to prepare for the difficult and dangerous final push. We smoked and sipped the tea and brandy. The shadow caused by the light on the other side of the mountain set off the fortress in forbidding silhouette. We could see its silent ruins a few hundred feet above. We sat in the very rubble of the Roman earthworks and the fallen remnants of the wall that Herod had built at the summit. A good deal of the stone had toppled down the nearly vertical slopes on the three other sides of the mountain to come to rest on the floor of the Dead Sea itself.
The priest Jonathan had built the original Masada (masada means fortress). Later, in 42 B.C.E., Herod had fled here when Jerusalem fell to the Parthians, and built a wall encircling the plateau eighteen feet high, twelve feet thick, and approximately a mile in circumference. Thirty-eight towers, each approximately seventy-five feet high, had bristled from it. A palace was built within the wall, a temple, and storage buildings. Arms and provisions for ten thousand men were laid in, and there was even a reservoir system of great cisterns to catch rain water. More than a century later, in 70 C.E., another retreat from Jerusalem took place, when Titus conquered it. This time it was the Zealots who sought refuge here.
We roped ourselves together now, and a party went ahead to see if the winter rains or rockfalls had made the way too treacherous. A shout let us know that it was safe up ahead and we began to climb up again. The sun rose with the astonishing speed and intensity it seems to have in desert country. To the left the earth fell away sheer. We could see, hazily, great corrugated clefts, yellow canyon walls, and a void all the way down to the rift floor. Below and to the right was the broad rock on which we had rested. Now it looked small and unfamiliar under the sunlight. What little confidence we had gained in the early climb had rapidly dissipated. Only Menashke and a few others had had any experience here. We slid and grabbed, the rope torturing our hands and cutting deep welts across our bodies. We groped blindly over every foot of surface above us before advancing, and once we had to rappel in a wide swinging arc to cross a space where there was nothing to clutch but smooth wall. We followed the guide’s admonition to look up, always to look up. We climbed steadily from ledge to ledge, scraping skin, banging shins. First the rope would slacken, then become taut, and we would feel the delicious strength of half-a-dozen others hauling us along the abrasive rock. We taunted each other, and shouted directions and confidence to the stragglers. Then came the joy of seeing our companions silhouetted against the bare sky, beckoning and smiling, and shortly the rest of us were pulled onto the plateau floor.
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While climbing we had been in the shade, but now we were standing on Masada, and the April sun bleached everything within sight a violent yellow-white. The heat was extreme even that high up: in the Dead Sea region the temperature often rises to 140 degrees. It seemed incredible that a band of nine hundred sixty men, women, and children could have held out here as long as they did against the Romans. Yet we know that when the Romans finally breached the wall they found great quantities of oil, corn, wine, dates, and other food. To the south, wide fields attested to agriculture. For water there had been the great cisterns of Herod hollowed out in the solid rock. As we walked about we could see that the plateau was honeycombed with them. Playing out our rope, we found their depth to be about twenty-five to thirty feet. They had been sunk deep into the solid rock.
The remains of the temple were on the highest point of the plateau, a shapeless pile of white rock. The temple had stood on the brink of a sheer cliff, and directly below, on the floor of the valley, you could see the white rubble hurtled down by two thousand years of weather and decay. Along the eastern edge of the plateau were the remains of the palace, with five-foot walls still standing in square patterns. In the dust near the buildings we found potsherds, coins, and pieces of beautifully tinted vases. The general outlines of the towers and storage buildings could still plainly be seen.
Masada, however, was more than this—more than a thrilling climb and an archaeological curiosity. In this vast burial ground nine hundred sixty of the Sicarii had committed suicide to escape Roman slavery. Uncompromising and fierce, they faced their hopeless situation with the same fanatical spirit that had brought them the names of Zealots and Sicarii, with the same violence that had led them to kill fellow Jews who had gone over to the Romans. As the walls of their fortress crumbled and the Romans stood ready with their battering machines, their leader, Eleazar ben Jair, had exhorted them to die rather than surrender. A small group of women and children hid and survived. According to Flavius Joseph, the Jewish priest, general, and historian, the women reported Eleazar’s words: “Since we long ago resolved never to be servants to the Romans, or to any other than God himself, let us now put that resolution into practice. . . . We are the very first that revolted from them, and we are the last to fight against them. . . . It is very plain that we will be taken within a day’s time. . . . We were born to die . . . death before slavery.”
The fortress was considered impregnable and a strong wind had whipped the flames of the fires set by the Romans back upon them, but the Zealots saw the wind shift again and the flames turn back toward themselves, and they knew that the fortress would fall. Eleazar took this change in the wind to be God’s sign that the situation was hopeless. Thereupon at his direction the Jews made a great gesture of contempt. They set fire to everything that could be of use to the Romans, their possessions, their arms, and the wooden superstructure of the fortress it-self, everything but their provisions, which were still ample. The enemy was thus to know that they had chosen their doom freely, not out of a “want of necessities.” Then each of the men killed his wife and children, ten men killed the rest of the men, and one of the ten the other nine and then himself.
The next morning, when the Romans made their last assault on Masada, there was no enemy to engage, only the high terrible loneliness of the wind and sky and the crackle of a dying fire.
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